Vita Merlini is a Latin hexameter poem postluding Geoffrey’s earlier ‘Prophecies of Merlin’ in his History of the Kings of Britain. It establishes ‘Merlin’, transmuted from Welsh ‘Myrddin’, though not as the familiar Arthurian wizard, nor as a mediæval Harry Potter.

Merlin here is depressive, at times mad, craving the hermit life, fluctuating between woods and court, a skilled astronomer but reluctant wonderworker. Walker appositely quotes Arthur C Clarke’s Fort-like dictum: “Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.”

The poem ranges from battle scenes to erotic intrigues to discourses on strange phenomena involving birds, fish and islands, springs and lakes.